I’ve been doing a lot of work with the Release Candidate of System Center Orchestrator, so it’s always interesting to see what other orchestration products are capable of.  I recently read a blog post on Creating Workflow Loops in vCenter Orchestrator...

I was inspired by Eric Gray’s recent post “ Disingenuous cost comparisons ” which purports to show all the ways that VMware costs less than Microsoft.  I thought I’d take Eric’s advice and see for myself by trying the VMware cost comparison calculator...

Back to my long neglected blog… Inspired by Adam’s post about building his own Opalis integration pack I thought I’d give it a go myself. I’ve seen the sessions at MMS, but never actually sat down to do this. I thought I’d...

One of the things that isn’t made 100% clear in the DPM documentation is what you need to do for Hyper-V VM’s that you are protecting at the Hyper-V host layer. The “ Protected Computer Software Requirements ” document on Technet tells you that you need...

In my last post on this subject I set up the cluster patching framework in Opalis. In this post I’m going to modify the policy initiation phase to use PowerShell & some text manipulation to make it more dynamic. I’d set this up originally to simply...

I’m using this post to document my experiments with Opalis.  One of the things I’ve been thinking about is using Opalis to orchestrate complicated patching scenarios that have traditionally been difficult to do with tools like System Center Configuration...

One of the scenarios that we had running at TechEd NZ was a continuous live migration between two hosts which I had set up using Virtual Machine Manager & the Powershell components.  Someone asked for it internally, and I thought I’d post it...

In my previous post I talked about some of the advantages of using agent based technology to deliver virtual applications.  There were a couple of things that I forgot to include when I wrote that post.  So continuing on from that list, here...

One of the things I sometimes hear from my customers when we’re talking about Application Virtualisation is “why do you need an agent for virtualising applications, especially when some of your competitors don’t?”.  My answer to them is “what do...

As I said in my post below, I read a lot of blogs.  I’ve been meaning to write a response to a post I read on Vcritical.com for a while, and haven’t got around to it.  Vcritical is written by Eric Gray who is a VMware employee, so clearly he...

I love working in the IT industry.  Apart from being involved in an industry that is constantly changing and evolving, there are also lots of smart people out there who are doing & saying stuff that is interesting & challenging.  I read...

I’ve just been playing with the new Service Level Dashboard for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.  It’s a great improvement on the first version, and it’s pretty straightforward to set up.  I thought I’d document the steps I took to...

For those that want them, here are the PowerPoint presentations from the DPM Unplugged events that ran in Auckland, Wellington & Christchurch last week. I hope that all who attended enjoyed the events, and got a lot out of them, and thanks to Peter...

Like I said before , I don't like to use this blog to simply mirror product announcements (although can I just say - the Windows 7 beta rocks!). I talk a lot to customers about Operating System Deployment in System Center Configuration Manager. With the...

I'm mostly posting this as a reminder to myself, but someone may find it useful. This is the subselect syntax for ConfigMgr queries, so you can do a query along the lines of "Show me all the machines that meet criteria X except the machines that meet...

One of the things I often get asked by customers is how do they make it possible for a user to rebuild a failed machine at their desk, without requiring that the machine is moved to a special collection, or other administrative input. There are several...

I made a decision when I started this blog to only use it for original content and not just repost links to other site (which explains why I don't post frequently). However this one is near and dear to my heart. We have some DPM technical events coming...

I upgraded my home laptop to the beta of Windows 7 this weekend, and when I ran Windows Update I kept getting error 80072ee2 in the windowsupdate.log. It's a good idea to run windows update when you've done a fresh install of Windows 7 as it picks up...

I’ve recently been working in a proof of concept environment streaming some virtual applications from System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2. The process for adding a virtual application is really simple – there is a nice wizard that you run and...

Here is the deck from the "Deploying Windows Vista with MDT" session that I've run at Technet Unplugged. It's shamelessly stolen from Michael Niehaus & Tim Mintners sessions from Teched, so thanks to them for doing all the hard work.

There was an video posted recently showing the difference between setting up Hyper-V with Windows Server Core, and setting up ESX3i. Mike DiPetrillo posted an interesting comment to the effect that the commands that were entered were net new for Windows...

Looks like there is an issue with VMware and their update 2 for ESX 3.5 where when the date gets to 12th August, ESX stops working: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/162377?tstart=0 The workaround is to manually reset the time back a day or two...

I recently had a look at an issue with the Configuration Manager PXE Service Point running on a test environment of mine. I couldn't get any of my operating system images to deploy - in fact I couldn't get the PXE boot to complete successfully. In the...

One of the things I've recently been working on is a question asked by a partner - how do I get extra information about my machines into Operations Manager? If you're not familiar with extending Operations Manager and using Classes & Discovery, it...

I was just talking to one of my colleagues about the difference between Revert & Apply when using the Hyper-V management console. They are almost the same thing, just that Revert is a special case of Apply. Apply is used on any snapshot that you want...